1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method and system for administering automatic door apparatuses adapted for maintenance of the automatic door apparatuses, and to an automatic door apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
An arrangement of a conventional automatic sliding door system is described. The conventional automatic sliding door system comprises a pair of slidable door panels disposed in a doorway of a building, an open/close mechanism for opening and closing the door panels, an open/close controlling unit for controlling the open/close mechanism, and a sensor for detecting approach and leave of a passerby toward and away from the door panels.
When the sensor detects a passerby, a detection signal is sent to the open/close controlling unit. In response to the detection signal, the open/close controlling unit drives a motor of the open/close mechanism to circulate an endless belt stretched around a drive pulley and a driven pulley.
The door panels suspend from an upper section or upper belt and a lower section or lower belt of the endless belt via hangers which travel along guide rails, respectively. The door panels slide toward and away from each other as the door panels are respectively guided along the upper belt and the lower belt which run back and forth in opposite directions, thereby opening and closing the doorway.
In the above-constructed automatic door system, a wear-out component such as a roller which is mounted on a hanger and rolls along the guide rails is replaced with a new one at the time of maintenance. Repair is conducted each time when malfunction such as breakage of a belt takes place.
If the automatic door system encounters malfunction, a service personnel is dispatched for repair from a maintenance station such as a sales agent (or maintenance service agent) upon receiving report of the malfunction from the builder who constructed the automatic door system or an equivalent source.
If the automatic door system to be repaired has a self-diagnosing function, a service personnel is informed of a self-diagnosis result through the display section of his or her handy terminal by electrically connecting the handy terminal with an external connecting terminal of the automatic door system. Thereby, the service personnel can grasp the contents on the malfunction (see, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 5,884,237).
Self-diagnosing function is generally such that the automatic door system itself diagnoses malfunction or abnormality of its own with use of a sensor or its equivalent, and stores a result on diagnosis in a storage unit in the automatic door system. There is known a remote monitoring system for an automatic door system (as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,392,537), in which remote monitoring of an automatic door system is executable by transmitting a self-diagnosis result on the automatic door system to an external device via a communications line.
In the automatic door system disclosed in the latter publication, each controller of a plurality of automatic door systems is connected with a dedicated terminal device serving as a maintenance station via a communications line, and information as to which automatic door system encountered malfunction is transmitted to the maintenance station, along with a self-diagnosis result indicating a malfunctioned part of the automatic door system when abnormality is alerted.
In this way, efficiency on maintenance service and repair of automatic door systems has been improved.
After the actual repair, the service personnel brings back the contents on the maintenance service and repair in the form of a note or memorandum to the sales agent (or maintenance service agent) from where the service personnel has been dispatched. Thus, the histories on the maintenance service and repair regarding the automatic door systems are administered individually among the sales agents (or maintenance service agents).
In the above system, however, merely specific personnel or staff members in the sales agent are authorized to browse the contents on the maintenance service and repair. Further, generally, since the histories on the maintenance service and repair are filed in the format of monthly printed matters, a service personnel is required to manually search the relevant history on repair of the target automatic door system which the service personnel is requested to repair among a heap of files, which is a cumbersome operation. Therefore, in most of the cases, the service personnel utilizes merely a most recent history on repair. Thus, the histories on maintenance service and repair have not been fully utilized, thereby hindering improvement in efficiency on maintenance service and repair.
The conventional automatic door system has suffered from another problem. The external light is likely to be incident on an optical sensor for detecting a passerby during a specific time zone, which may likely to give rise to erroneous operation of the sensor. When malfunction is detected due to such an erroneous operation of the sensor, it is difficult to determine the cause of the malfunction if the storage unit does not have recorded information that the mounting angle of the sensor has been adjusted with respect to the specific automatic door system, as a repair history.
Thus, it is highly likely that a sales agent with poor storage of repair history may fail to accurately determine some of the causes of malfunctions even if the automatic door system is equipped with a self-diagnosing function.
Further, the contents on maintenance service and repair are useful information for manufacturers of automatic door systems as well as for the sales agents and maintenance service agents in development of the automatic door systems. Therefore, there is a demand for constructing a system in which the contents on maintenance and repair concerning automatic door systems are collected and centrally administered, and a database storing the contents is freely accessible from various personnel involved in the automatic door systems. By constructing such a system, malfunction of an automatic door system can be diagnosed integrally from various points of view, and a possible malfunction can be predicted based on an analysis on phenomena associated with a specific malfunction.
Furthermore, in the conventional door system equipped with the self-diagnosing function, the door controlling unit is designed to automatically perform self-diagnosis in response to actuation of the temperature sensor mounted on the motor surface, if abnormality such as an overheated state of the motor took place, for example. In such an occasion, the cause of the overheated state of the motor cannot be determined despite of easy identification of the malfunctioned part. Thus, the automatic door system equipped with the self-diagnosing function fails to provide a fundamental solution for eliminating the cause of the malfunction.